Frankly, coming up with new ideas for columns is not my strong point. In desperation, I asked our west coast salesperson for ideas. He consistently sells well, even in hard times.

He felt it all boiled down to a few simple things:

1. Sell a good product.

2. Try different things, (and keep track of what works).

3. Work harder when times are tough.

It’s all a numbers game. If you send out a hundred mailings in good times to make a sale, you need to do two or three hundred in hard times to make the same sale.

DoorPack is designed to help you with this process. We track and measure sales activities, by campaign. You know that it has taken 100 calls to produce a sale in good times. When you need to ramp things up, you have a baseline and history to start from.

You can also set-up goals for your sales-people, based on the activities needed to reach the sales volume you need. It’s all a numbers game. You need information to make it manageable.

Customer Satisfaction, the key to success

Customer satisfaction is the most important thing that drives a business to success. Whenever you lose a good customer, you need to backtrack  to the service and installation problems that proceeded the loss. You may get an unpleasant surprise.

What’s that? You can’t pull together information on previous service and installation delays without a long drawn out manual search? That may be a symptom of the problem.

You need to know what customer’s have been inconvenienced, and why. When you lose business, you need to backtrack the problem. DoorPack pulls all of the information together into one place, so you can identify and fix problems before you lose the customer.

Check out http://www.doorpack.com/customer-service-history on our website.

They updated our multiplier again!!!

Everyone dreads the multiplier change. It’s time to get out all those spreadsheets and pricing books and go to work. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could update all those prices with a click of a button? You can with DoorPack. Our pricing module allows the user to automatically update all of their pricing with a click of a button when a multiplier is changed:

No more tedious update of spreadsheets and pricing, one click of a button takes care of it.

Fireline Systems is an authorized Intuit QuickBooks Silver Development Partner and creator of the leading DoorPack Software which is designed specifically for door and access control dealers. DoorPack Service Software and QuickBooks Software are seamlessly integrated together to provide a complete software solution for all of your operational needs. (Click for PDF)

What are the advantages of using DoorPack Software?
DoorPack Software when combined with QuickBooks increases the overall efficiency of your entire company by helping to; increase sales; eliminate time wasting double and triple entry; reduce your paperwork; eliminate manual process of scheduling service and installation jobs; streamlining your quote preparation; managing your advertising campaigns and much, much more. And you can continue using QuickBooks for all of your normal billing and accounting processes.

DoorPack is the perfect compliment for QuickBooks. Take a minute to look at some of the additional features and benefits provided to your company by DoorPack Software:

Provides Additional Customer History information including:

• Tracking work order history for each customer job location and billing customer
• Detailed customer work order history – with drill-down details
• Tracking installed customer equipment – by manufacturer, serial numbers, warranty information, size, type and other details
• Unlimited customer contacts with phone numbers, emails, etc.
• Attaching scanned document – including before and after pictures
• Tracking unlimited customer notes
• Tracking preventative maintenance schedules and agreements
• Provides the added flexibility to expand your customer history with additional customer user-defined fields, installed product user-defined fields, work order user-defined fields and additional contact fields for each customer.

Company-wide Viewing of Your Scheduling Calendars plus:

One of our customers wanted more control over installations. The availability of parts was a major headache. He ordered most of his parts specifically for the job. Time after time the technician would get to the site, and be unable to finish, because a specific part was not available.

Receipts were scheduled in an excel spreadsheet. As parts were received, they were checked off on the sheet. When everything was checked off the installation was scheduled. In practice this should have worked. In reality, purchase orders, receipts, and the spreadsheet were constantly getting out of sync. Information on the spreadsheet differed from the Purchase Orders in QuickBooks. Since there was no delivery date on the PO line-item in QuickBooks, it was difficult to synchronize deliveries with installations.

Automating Purchase Orders and delivery schedules fixed the problem. The sales-person was given the responsibility to start the process when the quote was accepted. He or she would create the installation work order, which included all of the information on the quotation. The installation work order would be put on hold until the parts were received. The salesperson would also create a preliminary purchase order for the part, and assign it a delivery date and method. It was easy to look at a work order and see what parts needed to be expedited.

We created a main delivery schedule which includes scheduled parts deliveries, and customer installation requirements. The owner can now review the preliminary purchase orders and deliveries, change them as needed, and combine them into purchase orders for the vendors. The critical deliveries stand out, and can be expedited when necessary. When scheduling installations, it is easy to see if all the parts have been received, and a picking list of required parts is printed out with the work-order.

Best of all, everyone has up to date information. Projected work order deliveries are immediately transferred to the main schedule. Changes to the main delivery schedule are instantly transferred to the work order. People have the information needed to respond properly to customer questions.